Wide Aperture Exoplanet Telescope: a low-cost flat configuration for a 100+ meter ground based telescope

Abstract

The Wide Aperture Exoplanet Telescope (WAET) is a ground-based optical telescope layout in which one dimension of a filled aperture can be made very, very large (beyond 100 m) at low cost and complexity. With an unusual beam path but an otherwise-conventional optics, we obtain a fully-steerable telescope on a low-rise mount with a fixed gravity vector on key components. Numerous design considerations and scaling laws suggest that WAET can be far less expensive than other giant segmented mirror telescopes.